There’s something insulting about being governed by fools. Especially misgoverned. It’s OK if everything’s going pretty well though it feels more like dumb luck than the statespersons you think you deserve. But when you’re being oppressed or steered into disaster by clueless third-raters, it adds insult to injury. (It is, parenthetically, one reason people are drawn to conspiracy theories: it is flattering to imagine we are persecuted by mighty international cabals rather than trampled by homegrown dolts.) Which brings us to, well, where shall we start? Ed Miliband in Britain? A fine suggestion. But permit us, perhaps parochially, to choose Julie Dabrusin. Who? you may very well ask. “Who?” you may indeed blurt out, as though just informed of the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (That’d be László Krasznahorkai “whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia and melancholy” in deliberately impenetrable run-on-sentences and paragraphs.) So allow us to explain. Dabrusin was chosen to be Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change despite her lack of obvious credentials in the field, having focused on Middle Eastern studies, law and “government neglect of Canada’s urban areas”, because the other candidates were just too embarrassing. But alas, she thinks ambition is the solution to failed ambition. So here we go again.

Dabrusin was just put on the hot seat because Canada’s Environment Commissioner told Canada’s Senate Energy Committee that our nation has the worst record on greenhouse gas emissions in the G7. It’s awkward, if you really believe our factories and fields are belching planet-incinerating “carbon pollution” and so forth. Which Dabrusin clearly does, like her boss Prime Minister Mark Carney. And her former boss Justin Trudeau, a preening climate-change fanatic who had made her Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (who?), then to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change then to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. So she’s no newbie.

Which makes it doubly awkward if you’re the ones who have been on this file like beavers and instead of falling the tree keeps growing. Which is the case since the Canadian government has not been indifferent to this file. On the contrary, it has long combined soaring ambition with plummeting capability, churning out one grandiose plan after another to self-satisfied rhetoric about good intentions, only to fail dismally, congratulate itself and do another one. It might humble lesser persons. (Or make them feel unwell if, for some reason, they went back and read the self-congratulatory prose that has accompanied one feeble dud plan after another.)

Instead, with six years in cabinet under her belt, four of them in this field, here’s Dabrusin’s reaction to the news that instead of going down, our emissions have risen since 1990, unlike any of our G7 peers including the United States under Trump the Orange Climate Demon:

“Look, we have already said many times, we know the emissions target for 2030 is really ambitious. But you know, Canadians are ambitious. It’s going to be hard to do but we’re going to keep working to make sure we get Canada to net zero by 2050.”

There is, of course, an outside chance that she realized even while doing it that she was babbling double nonsense. Perhaps her inner voice was yelling “Must… shut… mouth… and… flee.” But who can say so with confidence?

We call it double nonsense because it starts with the common fatuity Thomas Sowell explores in A Conflict of Visions of believing the key to successful public policy initiatives is sufficiently strong, and sufficiently loudly proclaimed, good intentions. It is a strange thing for adults to believe about anything. It wouldn’t get you far in car repair, for instance. Or cooking. And after a few years living on your own you ought to know good intentions don’t get the dog fed, the sink cleaned or much of anything. But a lot of chronological adults do believe it anyway, and it is one of the reasons so much public policy disaster is, embarrassingly, brought down on us not by malicious giants but by lackwit dwarves. And it gets worse.

Dabrusin’s remarks are rendered doubly and hopelessly inane by the fact that Canadian politicians, mostly in her own party, have had one thing and one thing only on the climate file for a third of a century now. And it is (drum roll please) ambition. They have not had understanding, of the science, the economics or the administration. They certainly have not had success. But over and over again they have brandished their vaulting ambition.

We are the best. This plan is the best. We are saving the planet. Yes, us the great. And year after year, decade after decade, they’ve seen their hopes crash into the rocky ground of reality and gone ah but now at last we have… ambition.

Dabrusin ought particularly to be rebuked for the line “Canadians are ambitious.” It is flattering, like all those ads telling us we deserve a special vacation, or a government handout. But just as those ads and press releases are mysteriously vague about what particularly we did that entitles us to something so exceptional, Dabrusin is vague, nay silent, about what particularly indicates that “Canadians are ambitious” or in what ways.

In fact we have been stereotyped over the years for modesty and restraint not swagger. We are famous for apologizing if someone steps on our foot. We are famous for being meek, as in the joke about how you get 30 Canadians out of a swimming pool. (“Hey, you Canadians, get out of that swimming pool.”) We have been accused, in fact, of having not American swagger but a passion for the bronze. (By The Economist before it went from acerbic to woke.) But ambitious? Would any international poll of attitudes toward Canada, even if it found they were mostly favourable, highlight that attribute?

So her emergency babble wasn’t just obsequious, it was inane, as a matter of fact and as a policy approach. Yet there she stands, smug and sassy.

There’s a scene in the satirical series Yes Minister where the hapless Minister of Administrative Affairs Jim Hacker is terrified at being invited for a drink at #10 Downing Street because he’s certain it means he’s being called on the carpet. And he knows why: a failed performance before a parliamentary committee. Which triggers this classic exchange:

“Hacker: The PM wants to know why our replies have been so feeble.
Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby: Perhaps it’s just for a drink.
Hacker: Don’t be silly, Humphrey. They don’t ask you to Number 10 for a drink just because they think you’re thirsty!”

Hacker is, in significant ways, a self-important buffoon. But he’s not so dense that he doesn’t know he’s in trouble or have some idea why. It helps make him human, even sympathetic. Alas, Yes Minister is fiction. The Dabrusin story is not.

So ask yourself. Did she go home after spouting that idiocy and face-palm? Or did she think “Nailed it!”? And was she invited to 24 Sussex “for a drink” in the wake of it? Because it would be humiliating to think we have entrusted our fate to such Dunning Krugers that they do not know fatuity when they perpetrate it. But if we did, we need to face up to it.

Especially since they’re clearly not going to.